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Sam Altman Is Getting Desperate and It Is Starting to Show
- timmg 11mo agoNot sure why the government would bother to bail them out. I would imagine Google could take up most of the slack if OpenAI implodes.
- MangoToupe 11mo agoYou don't typically get to be a successful politician by being skeptical of future industry profits. I suspect the people who run our country tend to be credulous rubes in this regard. Sam Altman is many things, but he appears very good at spelling a narrative about the future of computation and the relative competitive risk of not aggressively pursuing it. Google simply has not taken this approach.
- shortrounddev2 11mo agoDoes anyone believe this vision anymore though? It's obvious that the current tech is not the path to AGI
- Ekaros 11mo agoI can see bailing out banks, you need to keep money flowing. Bailing out something like auto industry. Lot of employees with non-transferable skills and restructuring will be mess. With AI? Well just sell the assets in bankruptcy. Models can be sold, hardware and infra can be sold, IP and brands too can be sold. Employees, they have mostly transferable skills and are mobile already. Even if AI companies fall, other people can pick up the pieces if there is something valuable left. Market might be affected. But I don't think it is only domino.
- scotty79 11mo ago> With AI? Well just sell the assets in bankruptcy. Entire stock market will tank and a lot of very rich people will lose a lot of money. So government won't let that happen.
- Ekaros 11mo agoWouldn't a bailout worthy event already lead to stock market crash? Basically market run would be triggered if there was something that warranted a bailout. So would there be much to bailout to still prop-up the market?
- scotty79 11mo agoI think the stock market prices in the value of being "too big to fail". So bailing out might actually cause the stock to appreciate because uncertainty about the possibility of bailout suddenly disappears in a positive manner.
- watwut 11mo agoCause goverment loves them grifters and once they are bailed out they will gift things to the king personally. Otherwise said, high level corruption that is not even hidden these days.
- rich_sasha 11mo ago"oh the US cannot afford to lose the AI race to China, Mr President"
- lagniappe 11mo agoThis article seems very wishful, and typed up in an awkward format.
- prodigycorp 11mo agowhat is this article/website? it’s all very confusing. a blog post? a community post? is there an author? I really don’t mean to concern troll or anything but this text is so bizarre, it’s like it landed from space into the middle of some random website.
- supriyo-biswas 11mo agoMost likely some LLM thing creating an article by collating multiple sources.
- itsdavesanders 11mo agoIt looks like it’s a HN-like for stocks / market opinions.
- preommr 11mo agoIt looked AI generated so I got curious because it looks like some kind of link sharing forum. I think it is a blog post (you can see it here https://tickerfeed.net/articles https://tickerfeed.net/articles), from something called the "free lunch blog". Still not sure if it's ai generated or not.
- amelius 11mo agoTheir about page: > TickerFeed is a discussion forum centered around the stock market, public companies, investing strategies, financial news, and economic trends. Our goal is to foster insightful conversations that help investors and market watchers make sense of financial movements. Basically HN but for financial folks.
- rsync 11mo ago... but available only to users of google/apple/microsoft: https://tickerfeed.net/login https://tickerfeed.net/login I'd be interested in an "HN for financial folks" but the very modest ability to handle auth/login is a minimum requirement for me ...
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- JKCalhoun 11mo ago"In the past few months alone, OpenAI has racked up commitments of nearly $1.5 trillion, including: $250 billion with Microsoft - using Azure cloud platform capacity $500 billion with Oracle - for cloud computing capacity… : " I assume these companies will eat the loss and write it off for tax purposes.
- Mistletoe 11mo agoI’m reminded of this because I’m not sure you just write off $500B. Jerry: "So, we're gonna make the post office pay for my new stereo, now?" Kramer: "It's a write-off for them." Jerry: "How is it a write-off?" Kramer: "They just write it off." Jerry: "Write it off what?" Kramer: "Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything." Jerry: "You don't even know what a write-off is." Kramer: "Do you?" Jerry: "No, I don't." Kramer: "But they do. And they're the ones writing it off."
- skybrian 11mo agoI doubt there’s an asset to write off yet. Assuming normal accounting applies, OpenAI doesn’t owe them the money until they use the compute power. Then it becomes income, and accounts receivable goes up until they pay for it. The stock market can anticipate income that hasn’t arrived yet, but that just affects the stock price. (ChatGPT tells me that accounting rules are different for leases of an identifiable physical asset, though.)
- fnordpiglet 11mo agoThese “commitments” aren’t generally contractual obligations beyond some clawback or penalty for not fulfilling them. Don’t forget Microsoft and oracle retain the infrastructure built. It’s generally reserved capacity with minimum spend and a maximum spend as the quoted $1.5T. The spend also typically ramps and there are triggers and out clauses built in. These aren’t bonds or debt or what they imply as “coming due” in the article. People keep drawing parallels to the housing crisis and ensuing financial crisis. Those were hundreds of millions of individual contracts spread across thousands of banks and debt holders. There was little understanding at any individual institution of the correlation risks with subprime or the systemic counterparty risk (I know I sat in the center of core risk at one of the big systemic banks at the time). In this the institutions are all large, know their counterparts well, know OpenAI, etc. Despite all outward appearances none of them are signing up for insolvency, and none expect a bailout, and none WANT a bailout. It’s not good for any CFO’s career to be the one forced to give up the companies ownership to the US government and they at minimum will avoid this at all costs. I’m not saying this isn’t all a giant bubble, but it’s more akin to the dot com bubble which was more of a shakeout than long term consolidation. It’s hard to say the www isn’t an intensively valuable set of infrastructure and services even if pets.com went out of business (and its business model has turned out to be pretty viable since).
- softwaredoug 11mo agoIf the government were to bail out, OpenAI wouldn’t that open up litigation from competitors like Google or anthropic?
- dragonwriter 11mo ago> If the government were to bail out, OpenAI wouldn’t that open up litigation from competitors like Google or anthropic? No. Government has done lots of bailouts, and it is has never opened up litigation from conpetitors, even though a common result is that the government (1) stops their competitor from failing, and (2) becomes a major and active shareholder in their competitor. The reason it doesn't open up litigation is that there is no law which prohibits would therefore provide a cause of action for that.
- softwaredoug 11mo agoThe real real reason is probably they don’t want to anger Orange Jesus.
- dragonwriter 11mo agoTrump wasn’t President for any of the past major bailouts, so, no, I don’t think that was the reason there wasn’t major liability of the government to competitors of bailed out firms.
- paganel 11mo agoIt will be probably be painted as a strategic move of "we need to do this in order to remain in front of the Chinese!", so Google trying to litigate all this will, first, put it in the same boat as China's supporters, a very bad position to be right now if you're a big company in the US, and second, put the US Government's sight on its (Alphabet's) own business, that's also a very bad place to be if you're a near-monopoly as Alphabet now is.
- jMyles 11mo agoHe "clarified" on twitter. I think it's very important to presume good intentions, but I have to say, I found these even more troubling than a bailout: > What we do think might make sense is governments building (and owning) their own AI infrastructure, but then the upside of that should flow to the government as well. We can imagine a world where governments decide to offtake a lot of computing power and get to decide how to use it, and it may make sense to provide lower cost of capital to do so. Building a strategic national reserve of computing power makes a lot of sense. But this should be for the government’s benefit, not the benefit of private companies.
- dzink 11mo agoGovernment having a large AI farm goes towards one thing: using the AI to “guide” citizens with a firm and totally not-political arm.
- phplovesong 11mo agoThis is not openai, but AI in general, while being usefull it has yet to deliver. We sre living the same hype as back in the dotcom bubble. And when there is a bubble, it will fizzle out slowly or burst overnight.
- 1970-01-01 11mo agoI'm fairly bearish on AI. It's the unbelievable time crunch that he expected that is going to bite him back, not the technology overall. AI does work, just not the way he wants it to. It isn't an instant money machine.
- tim333 11mo agoCurrent AI could be run as a normal profit making business if they just charged users what it costs to run. I think the current drive to either provide it at zero cost or force it on people who don't even want it is a mistake, both financially and for the environment.
- Incipient 11mo agoI'd be genuinely curious what it ACTUALLY costs for a lot of these services. $10/mo for copilot I expect is entirely unsustainable, and the question is if it costs $20/mo, or $200/mo.
- softwaredoug 11mo agoWhy is this flagged? It’s a legitimate conversation important to our industry.
- skybrian 11mo agoI didn’t flag it, but it looks like accounting nonsense. These advance commitments probably aren’t assets on the books and there is likely no debt between OpenAI and its vendors. So at most, it’s a stock market bubble. If OpenAI doesn’t pay, its vendors have whatever data centers that they’ve built so far and can use them themselves or rent them to someone else.
- 1970-01-01 11mo agoI can't imagine a world where tenancy in massively overpowered DCs is cheaper than the electricity it costs to run them due to OpenAI. Reads like pure fiction.
- johanstokking 11mo agoI think the main point is in the closing of the article; that valuations of companies are driven up by OpenAI spent commitments, and that those companies combined now would represent 40% of S&P 500. You’re right, this is not accounting debt. I don’t think OpenAI’s spending commitments alone are the problem, but OpenAI imploding will have a cascading effect and a realization check for everyone in the industry. What are the real prices for profitability and are businesses and consumers willing to pay for that, will we need ads, do we need an integrated product offerings to amortize the cost instead of standalone chat, etc. Also, S&P 500 going down by 10-20% will have a real impact on the real economy. If it happens. I don’t think this should have been flagged.
- skybrian 11mo agoIf the bubble bursts then lots of investors will discover that they're poorer than they thought. I think the big tech firms will come out of it okay, though, due to holding lots of cash and little debt. They have other sources of income. But apparently there are ways to keep the debt used to build data centers off the books? What happens if the data centers are no longer needed? I can't tell if that's an accounting fiction (the tech company has to buy the data centers anyway) or if the tech company can say "never mind, I don't need any more datacenters" and bondholders lose their money.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- mrcsharp 11mo agoThis is flagged? Why?
- dreamcompiler 11mo agoThe Trump administration (in the person of David Sacks) has already said they would not bail out OpenAI in response to the comments of the OpenAI CFO. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/trump-ai-sacks-federal-bailout-openai-friar.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/trump-ai-sacks-federal-bailo...
- dreamcompiler 11mo agoThis should not be flagged. The word "desperate" in the title is opinion, but everything in the article has been confirmed by multiple news outlets.
- scotty79 11mo ago> This company is going to blow up the whole fucking economy US economy growth without AI is around 0.1%, so I don't think there's too much to blow up. AI is pretty much the last hail merry US has in their bag and even that not for long. https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/data-centers-gdp-growth-zero-first-half-2025-jason-furman-harvard-economist/ https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/data-centers-gdp-growth-zero-...